Page 111 of Boardroom Mask

What the hell happened? We were having a good time! I want so badly to chase him down, grab him by the collar, and demand an explanation.Why do you have to ruin everything just when it’s getting nice? Why can’t we just be fucking normal for once? Don’t I deserve that? Don’t you? Don’t we?

It’s the look I saw on his face that stops me from following in his footsteps. Whatever that haunted daze, it wasn’t about me. There was something behind his eyes that I couldn’t reach. And chasing a man into the dark when he looks at you with that much dread in his face is a surefire way to make everything worse.

So I don’t go after him right away.

I look back out through the eyeholes of my mask at the ongoing scene. The actor on the bed is still dead, obviously. That’s how that tends to work, in my experience. The killer has dropped to his knees beside the body and is now cradling the dead man’s hand, nuzzling it against his own cheek. Grief, guilt, horror—all of it is written across his painted face in perfect, wordless agony.

My hand is still warm where Kir was holding it.

I curl my fingers into a fist and press it against my cheek, just like the actor on stage. Kir’s scent and heat are there, as reassuring as ever. If this is the last time I ever see Kir Lazarev, I know that I’ll still have this gut-level pang of attraction and guilt whenever I so much as smell a stick of Big Red for the rest of my life. Cinnamon has become my one and only aphrodisiac. The scent of dreams and nightmares alike.

The lights fade to black and the four-poster bed falls into shadow. Around me, a few audience members drift toward the exits, following other actors into other rooms, other stories. The ballroom thins out. The fog machine hisses from above the bed, pumping more gray vapor into a room that already has too much of it.

I replay the last sixty seconds. We were fine. We werebetterthan fine. I was holding his hand and watching the performance and everything felt easy for once. Just two people on a date—what a concept. And then the actor put his hands around the sleeping man’s throat and Kir went somewhere else entirely.

I know what that looks like. I’ve done it myself. Checked out, vacated, left the building while my body stayed behind. It usuallymeans something in the present just collided with something from the past, and the collision knocked everything offline.

What did he see up there on that stage that I didn’t?

A man killing another man in his bed. Hands around a throat. A body going limp.

I think about what Kir told me in my kitchen. His mother. The pills. His father walking past with her body in his arms.

Oh.Can’t say that doesn’t make perfect sense.

I stand there for another ten seconds, fist pressed to my cheek, breathing in the remnants of him. Then I drop my hand, and one word fills up my head like a billboard in bright neon.

No.

No, he doesn’t get to do this.

He doesn’t get to hold my hand through five floors of this haunted hotel, kiss me behind a curtain, look at me the way he looked at me when I told him this was the best date of my life, and then bolt the second it gets hard. That’s not how this works. And yeah, I know the irony of me being the one to say that, because I’ve been running from hard things since I was nineteen years old. I have a black belt in Avoid-Kwon-Do. I could teach a fucking masterclass.

But I’m here, aren’t I? Me, the woman who hasn’t let a man get past a second drink in five years. I still sleep with the lights on, for God’s sake, but I came here, despite the fear and the memories that haunt me day in and day out. Ishowed the fuck upfor something that terrified me, on the mere sliver of a chance that there might still be a happy-ever-after hidden in the shadows.

If I can do it, he can damn well do it, too.

His father murdered his mother in cold blood and then buried her in an unmarked grave, and their son saw it all, and yeah, that’s about as horrible as things get. But a stranger stole my body and my innocence from me, and in a sick fucking way, stole the greatest blessing of my life from me, too, so it’s not as if I’m not speaking from experience here. We both arrived at the beginning of this nightmare with baggage aplenty.

But when Kir killed the lights in my house, pushed me to my knees, and told me tostay,I fuckingstayed,didn’t I? I did. I know I did. I stayed for everything that came after, too, all the uncertainty and fear. I stayed not because he is safe—he is categorically the least safe person I have ever met—but because he didn’t let me float away. He grabbed me by the chin, pulled me back into my own skin, and made me feel every single second of it. That mattered more than safety ever has.

So now, it’s my turn.

He’s out there somewhere, shivering in the dark with his father’s metaphorical hand wrapped around his throat, convincing himself he’s a monster.

And maybe he is. Maybe we both are.

But monsters don’t get to quit on each other. Not when we’re on the verge of finding our way out of the darkness.

I rip my mask off, tuck it into my clutch, and start running for the nearest exit sign.

I push through the curtain and back out into the corridor. The hallway is cramped and dark, and there are masked bodies everywhere, drifting in that slow, dreamlike way the showdemands. I don’t botherexcuse me-ing my way through the bewitched herd; I just start to shove. A guy in a peacoat stumbles sideways as I clip his shoulder and complains, but I pay him no mind.

As I bump through, I’m scanning every silhouette for the one that’s his. He’s impossible to miss. It’s not like I need to see his face to know it’s him; I’ve known his smell and his shape for far longer than I’ve known what his face looks like. That tall, proud posture, looming over everyone even when he’s falling the fuck apart.

But none of them are him. It’s just a sea of white ovals floating in the dim light, all identical and all wrong.

I keep moving anyway, because there’s this feeling that’s building in my chest. Like every step I take in his direction is a step closer to a version of us that could actually survive past tonight.